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A thread on the misuses of "self-identify". CN: transphobia, including screengrabs of tweets.
I've been thinking about the use of "self-identify" in transphobic circles, and how it's usually an equivocation that deliberately obscures trans life and political analysis. [1/?]
I've been thinking about the use of "self-identify" in transphobic circles, and how it's usually an equivocation that deliberately obscures trans life and political analysis. [1/?]
Here is Stock showing complete ignorance of both critical race theory and critical disability theory, using a straw tran to invalidate decades of work on what it means to be Black or disabled. [2/n]
![Here is Stock showing complete ignorance of both critical race theory and critical disability theory, using a straw tran to invalidate decades of work on what it means to be Black or disabled. [2/n]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJXj-ESU0AANjk3.jpg "Here is Stock showing complete ignorance of both critical race theory and critical disability theory, using a straw tran to invalidate decades of work on what it means to be Black or disabled. [2/n]")
In practical terms, *of course* in virtually all administrative situations one "self-identifies" as Black, disabled or a woman. There's never anyone checking what box you tick. Here, "self-identify" refers simply to the process of putting pen to paper.
But in disability circles, the political fact of taking on a disabled identity for oneself is a significant move, related to the crucial "social model of disability", where we recognise that we are disabled by society, not by the facts of our bodies. [4/n]
To "self-identify" in these terms does not mean to disregard the material facts of bodies (this is a debate within the social model: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09687599727380), but rather the political act of identifying as a social class for class liberation. [5/n]
Such political acts are of course a key part of radical feminism, hence the Woman-Identified Woman. Woman is a social class we build together, creating solidarity across the material differences of our lives and bodies. [6/n]
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/radicalesbianswoman.html
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/radicalesbianswoman.html
A third meaning of "self-identify" is Talia Mae Bettcher's usage of "First Person Authority" with regards to trans life, which is an *ethical* argument that the best way to know what gender someone is is to ask them: https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/31160131/20110704215810996.pdf [7/n]
So we have administrative, political and ethical usages of "self-identify", none of which are the ur-case that transphobes have in mind, which is a person abstracted from all social context saying "I'm a woman!" and then becoming one. [8/n]
![So we have administrative, political and ethical usages of "self-identify", none of which are the ur-case that transphobes have in mind, which is a person abstracted from all social context saying "I'm a woman!" and then becoming one. [8/n]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJXmlRHU8AAcd8X.jpg "So we have administrative, political and ethical usages of \"self-identify\", none of which are the ur-case that transphobes have in mind, which is a person abstracted from all social context saying \"I'm a woman!\" and then becoming one. [8/n]")
![So we have administrative, political and ethical usages of "self-identify", none of which are the ur-case that transphobes have in mind, which is a person abstracted from all social context saying "I'm a woman!" and then becoming one. [8/n]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJXmlRKU4AAjiMG.jpg "So we have administrative, political and ethical usages of \"self-identify\", none of which are the ur-case that transphobes have in mind, which is a person abstracted from all social context saying \"I'm a woman!\" and then becoming one. [8/n]")
This is the straw tran which has no interest in actual trans lives. Our long processes of self-discovery, reflection on political experiences of gender, hard-won understanding that woman as a class is necessary to us -- all are dispelled by the non-existent speech act. [9/n]
This is also not what is meant by a constitutive speech act in post-structuralist trans studies. A single verbal declaration ("self-identification") is not what we mean when we say gender is a performative: we mean a whole set of ways of being in the world over time. [10/n]
This marxist insight, continuous with de Beauvoir & Wittig, is that womanhood is produced socially by oppression & our responses. Where the Radicalesbians politically cathect womanhood, Wittig disavows it; both are also common trans moves. [11/n] https://medium.com/@thinobiafalx/monique-wittig-one-is-not-born-a-woman-74ed2fce4165
Stock never engages these marxist traditions of feminism, even as she proclaims trans politics as "neo-liberal". I'll note also that, along with her attacks on UCU membership, her feminism has not extended to supporting THE MASSIVE STRIKE THAT IS HAPPENING IN TWO WEEKS. [12/n]
I'll note here that while the first 70s-80s wave of transphobia did have a radical feminist analysis at least commensurable with foreshortened marxism ( https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4188-the-eradication-of-talmudic-abstractions-anti-semitism-transmisogyny-and-the-national-socialist-project), the contemporary wave is entirely informed by a retrograde liberal positivism. [13/n]
The philosophical school to which Stock & her collaborators all belong is the analytic school which in 150 years of historical materialism, and a century after Wittgenstein, still thinks that human words can refer completely and coherently to transcendent truths. [14/n]
I cannot emphasise enough that the foundations of Stock's philosophy are the ontological equivalent of a contemporary physicist pretending quantum mechanics doesn't exist. Their modes of argumentation read like alchemical treatises. It's bizarre. [15/n]
Worse, there is no feminist history of this kind of gender positivism. It cannot build a feminist movement and is out of touch with all antecedents. Which goes some way to explaining Stock's refusal to ever consider the actually existing functions of power. [16/n]
Stock wants to prove what gender is, but once she's done so to her satisfaction there's nothing left to do with that knowledge except hand it to the police. The methodology entails the bankrupt anti-feminist politics. She needs an authority to validate her argument. [17/n]
Consider what it would mean for UCU, or any other political organisation, to set explicit terms for who counts as disabled, rather than trusting disability organisations' politics & disabled folk's first person authority. How could that ever build a liberatory politics? [18/n]
Race, sex and disability are historically-situated social categories. You can't extract a transcendent definition from that & the only political movements that have sought to do so are colonialist and fascist. It's anathema to class politics. [19/n]
So back to "self-identify". Stock floats a "neo-liberal", behind which I detect a spooky ghost of "postmodernism". This is the contemporary fascist fear that truth is abstracted from reality, that information is free-floating & there are only individuals. http://www.existentialcomics.com/comic/224
The argument is that postmodernism has detached truth from the material base, and that only individual and singular speech acts have authority. This is a misreading of postmodernist theory and of transfeminism. [21/n]
When contemporary marxists and transfeminists talk about "identity", we are not talking about individual declarations, but historical facts. My identity is the way I belong to a class through oppression, through the performatives that constitute social being. [22/n]
Personally, to avoid this confusion, I never say "I identify as trans". I just say "I am trans". My transness is the product of my historical being in the world, oppressed by patriarchy, produced through the gender dynamics of the capitalist family. [23/n]
Against this analysis, transphobes deploy "Yes, but what if a man just says he's a woman to get into women's spaces?" This is a dishonest argument. (a) There's no empirical evidence of this happening when self-declaration is enshrined in law, (b) That's not how the world works...
... (c) Even if it did happen it wouldn't justify trans oppression and "coarse-grained safeguarding" is a phrase uttered by no-one who actually does safeguarding, (d) That's not what legal self-declaration or trans identity mean in the first place. [25/n]
It is very hard to find a response to this straw tran, because from the start it has been devised to obscure feminist analysis, shift the debate onto meaningless territory, and exclude trans thought. Frustrasting! [26/n]
I can't recommend engaging in these debates. I can only recommend reading transfeminist thinkers, learning about trans life, and strengthening trans presence in the world. I'm no longer interested in debating these dishonest terms. It's a social struggle. We'll win. [27/27]
